The Holyhead and the Great North Roads are identical as far as Barnet, and the first landmark on the way is the “Angel.” Every one knows the “Angel,” Islington. It is a great deal more than a public-house, and has attained the dignity of a geographical expression. Any teetotaller can afford to know the “Angel,” and the acquaintance is no more a stigma than an intimacy with the English Channel or the North Foreland. Five roads meet at this spot—for seventy years or so the meeting and starting point of omnibuses to and from all parts of North London. Nothing strikes the foreigner with greater astonishment than that our omnibus routes start from or end at some public-house, and that the “Angel,” the “Elephant and Castle,” the “Eyre Arms,” and the “Horns,” should be household names in different parts of London. The intelligent foreigner goes away and writes scathingly upon what he considers an evidence of drunkenness rampant in all classes of English society, and does not stop to enquire the origin of the custom, to be found far back in omnibus history, when many public-houses had convenient stables, and omnibus proprietors had none. The “Angel” is not in Islington at all, but just within the parish of Clerkenwell. How it came to be just inside the Clerkenwell boundary is told in the legend of a pauper being found dead in what was then called Back Road, now the Liverpool Road, at that time in the great parish of St. Mary, Islington (which by the way, is the largest and most populous parish in England, numbering over 350,000 souls), but now, with the “Angel” in that of St. John’s, Clerkenwell. Islington refused to bury the pauper and Clerkenwell performed that duty, afterwards claiming the land.